


like teenage gravity

by anothercover



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Secret Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-25
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-19 22:41:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9463508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothercover/pseuds/anothercover
Summary: Set immediately post-Avengers. An oldie but a goodie: our favorite spysassins were secretly married through the whole movie.





	

**Author's Note:**

> if you have read this before, do not worry: i'm moving some old fic over from a veryvery old LJ because honestly, it's more than about that time!

Every vow that two people could make to each other, they’d already made long ago, and neither of them have ever really been one to stand on ceremony. Still, when Clint floats the idea of marriage, Natasha is …oddly pleased, and entirely receptive. There’s something inexplicably appealing about the idea of making it official, and she agrees quickly enough that she surprises herself, a little. 

It’s almost annoying that Clint doesn’t seem surprised at all. 

Instead of a diamond ring, he buys her a P250 compact sig sauer with replacement barrels, and two weeks later, they hop a plane to Chicago to get it done before a justice of peace. Agent Coulson is their witness, partly because he’s the only person at SHIELD who knows how to keep his mouth shut and partly because he was already in the city to gather intel at a biophysics lab on the north side.

They spend their wedding night at the Drake Hotel downtown and fuck three times, twice in the bed and once in the shower. They’re supposed to have a few days alone, but in the morning, Fury calls and orders her to Russia – there’s an arms dealer they’ve been monitoring who has a weakness for pretty redheads, and it’s time to pull the trigger.

Clint stands behind her while she’s dressing, the image reflected in the mirror on the back of the door. His hands are warm on her shoulders and she likes the way they look there. 

“Mrs. Barton,” he says, feeling the syllables out.

“No. I don’t like that,” she says. “We won’t be doing that.”

“Tasha,” he amends, and smiles. “This is the problem with that no-fraternization-with-fellow-operatives policy. A super-secret marriage gets you a super crappy honeymoon package. We should be on a beach in Mexico. There should be salt and tequila and a lime in your cleavage and I should be licking my way towards it really, really slowly.” 

“Body shots in Mexico - that's your ideal honeymoon? I want a divorce.”

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be into it.”

She turns and wraps a hand around the back of his neck, pulling him in for a kiss. “Mexico is for children on spring break, and I’m not wedging pieces of fruit between my tits. The tequila… maybe. If you’re good.”

“I’m not good,” he says, and neither is she, not really, but they’re the same kind of not-good and together, that makes them…something, at least. 

Something that’s just better enough to feel the difference. 

They don’t say goodbye, because they never do, and besides, they’ll see each other soon, because they always do. On the plane a few hours later, it finally occurs to her that she’s a wife, she's somebody's wife and in all of the things Natasha Romanoff ever thought she’d be if she grew up, that wasn’t an option that made even the shortest of shortlists. 

And she’s glad. 

Of course, that doesn’t last long, because three days later, Coulson calls and informs her that her husband has been compromised.

The reason she could fall for Clint – the reason he could fall for her – is because they are cut from the same cloth, and if she has to put a bullet in his head, she will. She would prefer not to, of course, she'd do everything possible to avoid it, but neither of them went into this thing envisioning fields of daisies and slow-dances beneath rainbows. 

What they do involves ultimatums. It involves collateral damage and it involves making terrible, ugly decisions without blinking. 

She loves Clint, but she is so very used to losing things, and she can think that way because she knows if their positions were reversed, he’d make the same call. Neither of them are the type to run off on half-cocked rescue missions when there’s a job to be done. 

It is not a question of love.

It is, though, an incredibly shitty situation, but she can cope with it. She copes right up until the moment it’s all over – until Thor’s hauled Loki back to Asgard on the power of the tesseract, until Captain Rogers takes off back to his tiny apartment in Brooklyn, until Stark and Bruce hop into the convertible, giggling over astrophysics like giddy little schoolboys. 

She and Clint are left alone in Central Park, and for the first time in a very, very long stretch, there is nothing they have to do. There is nowhere they need to be. They haven’t spoken about it, but she assumes he’s debating the possibility of taking a break from SHIELD, because she knows that _she_ is, and a large part of her is very angry that her gut instincts are siding with Captain Rogers, Bruce, and Stark’s assessment of the situation instead of Director Fury’s. 

Natasha’s lived a long time off her gut instincts. 

It’s a conversation for another time, though. As soon as Stark’s ridiculous penis-compensation-mobile rounds the corner, Clint turns to her and says, “Let’s take a walk.”

They stroll through the park like any other couple out on a sunny May morning, enjoying this tiny piece of city that hasn’t been smashed to ruin, and it doesn’t occur to her that something’s wrong until Clint reaches for her hand. 

It’s a more public demonstration of affection than she’s used to, and when she turns to look at him in surprise, she sees he’s already looking at her. 

He’s staring at her, really, this look of perfect concentration. He gets the same look when he’s up high and calling out patterns, the way she’s seen him do a thousand times before. The way he looks when he’s memorizing the landscape of this particular battle so that he can recall it if a similar situation ever arises, so he’ll can have an automatic catalogue of what worked and what didn’t. 

“I love you,” he tells her. His voice is blistering with barely-concealed fury. 

Her fingers tighten on his, and her first thought is to break his arm, force him to his knees, and call for backup, because Loki’s hold on him obviously hasn’t been completely broken, he’ll need to go through a lengthier comedown than anticipated, they’ll need to be put in a safehouse together so she can walk him through it, she knows what it’s like to climb out of the shell and back into her own skin – 

But he counters swiftly, and the moment before she forces his shoulder out of its socket, he catches her around the waist, locks her firmly against him, and brings his other hand up to cup the side of her face. 

“I love you,” he repeats, still burning with rage. His fingertips are gentle, but his pulse is elevated and she can feel how fast his heart is beating. “He took that from me.”

Natasha is still. She is silent.

“I didn’t remember that I love you,” Clint says. “I didn’t _care_ that I love you. That’s what I _have_ , this is – ”

She knows. Exactly. 

Because when the world falls down and when things get too ugly and when the memories of everything she’s done come on too strong, there’s this. When she’s changing identities the way normal people change their sheets. When she makes a fuckup in the field that she can’t take back and somebody else pays for her fuckup with their life. 

Once she thought she was a rock, an island, an impenetrable fortress. 

Once, she was.

This is what they have. 

This is the fixed point that gravity has centered itself around, and this is supposed to be the place deep down inside both of them that’s true, that stays untouchable. 

Natasha looks at Clint –the first real friend she ever had in her entire life, long before he became the man she married – and it _hurts_. Nothing’s ever hurt like this, but it’s a hurt that she chose when she chose him. 

“This is still here,” she says. “This is _here_. It didn’t go anywhere, Clint. He tried to take it away and the best he could do was make you misplace it for a little while.”

Clint’s fingers slide through her hair, down along the back of her neck, and she snakes her hands into the back pocket of his jeans. 

“And if it’s ever misplaced again,” she adds, “I will hit you incredibly hard in the head as many times as it takes to find it.”

“We really should have written our own vows,” he says, after a moment, but the anger is seeping from his voice and he's here. He's with her. “I want to get you to swear to that in a court of law.”

“I swore it to you,” she tells him, and when he kisses her, it’s deep and wet and hot and completely inappropriate for the middle of a park when they’re still trying to keep their marriage a matter of private record. It’s also thoroughly reassuring, so Natasha lets it pass. 

When they’re finally ready to leave the park, to head out for the horizon like the rest of their team, he takes the opportunity to remind her that, amazingly enough, they’ve only been married just over a week. 

This time, she agrees to a real honeymoon. 

They don’t go to Mexico. They do find limes.


End file.
